


Tristhad Week Shortforms

by cognomen



Category: Hannibal (TV), King Arthur (2004)
Genre: Gen, M/M, Rule 63, Virginity, shortforms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-22
Updated: 2015-04-22
Packaged: 2018-03-25 06:54:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 18
Words: 3,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3801004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cognomen/pseuds/cognomen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of shortforms for a variety of prompts written over the duration of Tristhad week, collected here for your reading pleasure. These range, but are mostly very sweet.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. tiny Galahad meets a tiny Tristan as they're being drafted by the Roman military

Galahad is the shortest, by a hairsbreadth, by inches in some cases, amongst the boys gathered from Sarmatia. He does not mention that he is the youngest, protecting his secret closely. He has changed places with his oldest brother, only just tall enough to pass it off.

His mother needed the able help, and to have Galahad instead would be a burden to her.

One of his companions sees it anyway, a ragged child on a horse that is very fine. The contrast is strange to Galahad. He brings no mount with him, his family unable to spare their two horses to plow, but here was a boy who looked wild and dangerous and yet he rode what must be the finest mount in his village.

'You're too young to be here," the boy says, when they make camp the third day. Galahad has felt eyes watching him, measuring. 

He draws himself up and faces into those dark eyes, defiant.

"You're too filthy to be a soldier."

It is a callous and heartless cut, a defensive strike. The other just laughs, and his voice is already beginning to change, turning the sound to a low and sudden rumble.

"Despite both our faults, they took us anyway," he offers a hand, arm straight, a man's grip. "I'm Tristan."

For the first time and years too early Galahad gives his own hand as a soldier, and not a boy at play.


	2. One playfully denying the other something like a kiss or favorite treat.

Tristan enjoys the advantage of reach over Galahad - joyfully and often. It has become his custom to take small belongings or sweet fruits and lift them higher than Galahad can reach on tip-toes with his arms stretched up. A juvenile game he has not given up in adulthood.

"Pay the toll," he demands, a purr that leaves Galahad divided - equal parts desiring opposite things. The toll is, as ever, a kiss; the other desire is to sink his fist into Tristan's vulnerable, bared belly or to kick his shins so he must double over.

"You will find the toll very high one day," Galahad answers him, reaching up into Tristan's hair and yanking him down to press their mouths together.


	3. Kisses (and maybe more) to make a bad day better

Tristan kisses him once for the two miles of muddy trails they had marched on foot, leaving Galahad's muscles sore and screaming. Twice - one on each eyelid - for the unending rain that still falls over their quiet, solemn camp. Galahad's hair is still dripping wet, slick beneath Tristan's fingers.

For his chaffing clothes, Tristan presses a kiss over Galahad's collar bone, pulling the laces of his tunic undone to get there.

There are no number of kisses to erase the blood they have seen and spilled, no depth of embrace that will undo all of the miseries they have endured.

These small ones, Tristan does his best to erase before they can grow as big as the others. He kisses Galahad three times on the mouth with his hands warm on cold skin.

"The day wasn't _that_ bad," Galahad starts, but it is barely a protest. This is Tristan's balm, the gentle laughter they share.

"Can't we make it better anyway?" Tristan asks, trailing his fingers lower. Galahad's answer is a kiss of his own, given as if in blessing to the crown of Tristan's head.


	4. Galahad alludes to Tristan's enjoyment of killing...where'd that idea come from?

It's about control," Tristan suggests, when he has had his fourth cup of wine under Galahad's dour scrutiny.

"Death is not control," Galahad answers, sharply, flat. Tristan is still wearing the day's gore, drying in chunks and splashes on his armor.

Tristan smiles, a ferocious thing, and Galahad has seen him wear the expression in love and war, victory and challenge and defeat. He is vibrantly alive, with an animals violence where he needs it.

"Death is the control of danger," Tristan tells him, leaning back and lazy against the wall where he has settled. Too lazy to find a chair, content to sit on the floor. "What's dead is no danger to you."

Galahad cannot argue, for all he does not like the logic or reasoning. He wishes they were less involved with death, but they must trade in the currency daily. Ours for yours. 

"No one man, no one life is unconnected," Galahad says. "Killing protects you only from the part you see."

Tristan shakes his head, offering a slow smile before he presses his cup against his teeth again. "Then I will kill every part that seeks to kill me, as soon as I see it."


	5. how they got kicked out of that inn

"Galahad," Bors' voice, or Dagonets, sometimes even Lancelot, "tell 'em how you got kicked out of that Inn that one time."

And he starts, because the memory has grown too old to mortify him, and now all it does is make him smile.

It always begins the same way, but the middle and ending changes, the story now belonging equally to all of Arthur's knights.

"-so there goes Tristan down the stairs naked as the day he was born-"

"-out comes Galahad, with only his shield to cover up his great big-"

Galahad is always well endowed in this story, an addition that Tristan has popularized. 

"-and the inn-keep is roaring and yelling like an angry bull-"

"-he had, it seemed, no appreciation for old _Roman Custom_ -" delivered with a nod and a wink.

"-someone had stolen every knife he owned-"

"-he suddenly recognized his grandson's dark curls and blue eyes. Only," a pause for laughter," he goes banging on the _wrong door_."

The story has come to a hydra's nest of tangled meanings and outrageous endings, and each belongs to the knight that told it, each retold and changed and now even voices of ghosts can be heard at times in the words, adapted, retold. Parts that had once belonged to Mordred or Parsifal, now echoed in the voices of those who remember them.

"-well, no one expects a knight to start swinging _that_ sword around-"

"-never seen a fight end so quick as when he sat right down on the-"

"-either way, a knight's armed-"

"-pulled a knife, I swear, right out of his-"

The truth of the flight, the burning shame, the revenge his brothers had sought and gained, though now no man of Arthur's knights was allowed to drink or sup or stay at the Rotund Rooster no longer matters.

The story is _theirs_ , belonging to them as soundly as the two men who star in it, and of both of these things, Galahad is proud.


	6. the knights punish tristan for taking Galahads innocence

"His mission is supposed to be one of purity," Arthur laments as he stands over Tristan, frowning his disapproval. "How can he achieve a quest of spiritual innocence when he has been rendered-"

Arthur hesitates on the words, the corners of his mouth drawing further down, hands folded behind his back. He looks to Lancelot, and Tristan feels the hypocrasy of being scolded by that glance, of being reprimanded by _Lancelot_ , as if he has ever restrained his passions. 

"You know better," Arthur finishes, when Lancelot can offer no polite substitution of words.

Tristan makes an amused sound, even held down, unable to hold in his mirth. He will suffer gladly for this, given the truth.

He has not taken Galahad's innocence - if indeed the youngest knight had been _born_ with any.

Galahad has taken _his_.


	7. Gawain tries to consol Galahad becuase he thinks tristan is raping him, gawain does not realise that galahad and tristan are in a relationship

They are several minutes into the conversation when Galahad at last realize the drive of its thrust. He nearly spits the drink Gawain has pressed into his hands back into Gawain's face. His amusement fades quickly when he realizes Gawain is in earnest, and not pulling Galahad's chain.

"It's not your fault," Gawain tells him, trying to pass him another drink across the table that he has cornered Galahad at.

"Gawain," Galahad interjects, carefully withholding his laughter, "brother, think better of me. If I did not want his advances, I promise you-"

He pauses to look Gawain in the eyes earnestly, "I would _discourage_ them,"

Certainly, Galahad thinks, he would not so often tantalize Tristan until he was ravenous for it.


	8. Tristan wedding to Galahad (who is pretending to be a maiden called Isolde)

No one remarks on the 'beauty' of the 'bride', no one comments on how much consternation 'she' frowns with. The bride wears the white gown with a straight back and a stiff posture.

It's the kiss - given, received - that has real passion, brings color to the bare cheeks of the one who claims to be the maiden Isolde, though there is nothing maidenly about the way the dark stubble has already begun to shadow them.

"This idea," Galahad mutters, elevating his voice into a falsetto that fools no one, save perhaps the elderly, half-blind priest that Tristan has somehow convinced, "is terrible."

Tristan hoists him, white dress and trailing lace, and begins to carry him off the field. The wedding attendants seem confused as to whether to clap and cheer or jeer and holler, and instead fling hard rice kernels onto the retreating couple. "It worked, didn't it?"

Instead of throwing his bouquet, Galahad makes better use of it as a bludgeon, bending stems and scraping skin, but he discards it long before they step past the threshold.


	9. Tristan seducing a virgin galahad, with aurthur trying to stop him

The first time, Arthur interrupts their plans accidentally. After that, he keeps a closer eye on them. Galahad begins to think of it as a conspiracy to protect a virtue he thinks that Galahad cannot on his own. 

That he was willing and ready to surrender it to Tristan, that Tristan would bring him gifts often stolen or trophies of war, true - seemed not to matter to their captain.

"Arthur," he says, catching him after the fourth night Tristan is sent out on patrol, rather than allowed to remain and sleep, "stop."

The commander's eyes drift over Galahad as if he were a boy half his age, and that he supposes is the root of his problem.

Arthur hesitates a long moment, measuring Galahad as what he is now, ten years beyond needing such protection, and then nods once, slowly.


	10. Tristan flirting with galahad the first time they meet

The camp is noisy, bustling with Roman soldiers and other scared children, and the endless motion leaves Galahad anxious and unable to relax. The whole of it feels hostile and strange, and he gathers his knees to his chest and hangs onto them. He has nothing of his village but the clothes on his back and his memories.

Another body settles on the ground next to him, only a little taller. A warm hand closes over one of Galahad's and pulls it away from his knees. The stranger eases a woven bracelet of grasses and flowers around Galahad's wrist, a serious expression in his dark eyes, shaking his hair back from them.

"For protection," he promises, and displays one that matches on his own wrist.


	11. Tristan and gal on the same horse. Hannibal and Will in Hannibal's car.

Tristan's wrists brush against Galahad's sides, guiding the horse ostensibly, but perhaps taking more liberty with contact than he needs to.

"You should lose your horse more often," Tristan says, to amused to leave Galahad be.

"Don't you wish," Galahad answers, kicking the horse to a gallop to jostle Tristan's hands loose and close his mouth.

-

"I am perfectly capable," Will says, when he senses that Hannibal offers his car too often, takes the wheel too often, "of driving myself."

Hannibal curls his middle finger deftly into the keyring and swings his keys around in one single revolution, graceful. 

"It's not your _ability_ that concerns me," Hannibal says with a cavalier smile, "but your _car's_."


	12. Tristan following galahad into the forest and seducing him

Tristan does not have to trail after immediately, he can follow Galahad by instinct - in the dark, with his eyes closed if he needs to. Galahad steps lightly, but carelessly like a deer. His trail is much the same. Pressed moss, bent leaves, the barest bruises on the land he passes over.

He passes through the world in much the same way. Careful, but distant.

Tristan finds him alone and does not startle him when his hands settle over Galahad's hips, used to Tristan's intrusions by now.

"Do you ever let any opportunities to catch me alone pass you by?" he asks.

Galahad turns in Tristan's arms, without waiting for an answer. Tristan brushes back an errant curl - there are several that trail over Galahad's forehead, that whisper against his cheeks. He doesn't need to answer, just lean down and kiss him while Galahad leans up.


	13. Fem Tristan and Fem galahad meeting for the first time

The first time Tristan sees her, she isn't sure that Galahad is actually a girl. They tell her that one other had made so bold a play as Tristan, who had covered herself in mud so no one looked twice, who had held her tongue over the long leagues until it was too far to send her back.

While the soldiers decide what to do with them, they are left together.

Galahad is thin, straight, without any sign of curve. There is no hint of what she hides, cheeks only pink enough for youth, mouth frowning, brows stormy, eyes bright but angry. It is the long, dark lashes that give her away at last, while she holds her tongue in anger.

"Do you think they'll send us back?" she asks. She tries her best to mask her voice, tries to project enough hostility to suggest that she doesn't need Tristan's friendship, or any alliances at all.

She wants it though, to know that she isn't alone. Tristan shakes her lank hair back from her eyes, and decides she doesn't want to be alone either.

"It will be worse punishment to make us stay," Tristan answers, and smiles. She rolls one shoulder up in half a shrug. She doesn't care - or she hadn't, before those intense blue eyes settled on her - what happens to her.

Now, suddenly, it seems to matter.


	14. Female tristan and female galahad being the only female knights amongst men, and they are lovers

They have always been assigned the same tent, because of the blindness of the men around them, because as such their virtues were assured. After a time, the men no longer tread on tiptoes around them, welcoming them as fellow knights, comfortable enough that they no longer behave themselves all the time. They never guess that sharing quarters had given Tristan and Galahad all the privacy they needed.

"Do you think," Galahad asks, working braids into Tristan's hair to keep it from her eyes, a familiar and soothing ritual, "they ever suspect what they've given us?"

Tristan shifts, her head pillowed comfortably in Galahad's lap. "No."

It is a simple answer, and Tristan has always preferred those where she could give them.


	15. Galahad and Tristan sleeping together in a ditch

Tristan is all elbows and restlessness when he sleeps in confinement. He could spend all night in the fork of a tree and never move, but when laid down next to another body he became a flurry of motion, impossible to tame.

It is cold, and the ground is frozen hard, and every time Tristan throws himself over he takes the blankets with him.

"Be still," Galahad hisses, making an angry grab for the covers, only to have them pulled from his grasp. Finally, he climbs over Tristan to pin him flat, curling his hands into hard fists to keep the blankets over both of them.

"Finally," Tristan yawns, settling his arms around Galahad's waist, "I can be comfortable."


	16. Lancelot challenging tristan to a duel for harming Galahad

The strike takes him by surprise while shock still rides hard on Tristan's shoulders. He hadn't intended - would never _mean_ \- to injure Galahad. 

A slipped sword stroke in a moment of careless overconfidence. Galahad has never once surprised Tristan in spars, save this time. 

It was nothing, a scratch, but it cut deep in their trust - an unexpected wound.

Now, in his fury, Lancelot comes to seek revenge, his temper hot, his volume loud, and Tristan allows the challenging strike to fall. He lets the challenge be issued.

He says nothing and does not defend himself and pays in three times the blood for his mistake, until his brothers pull Lancelot away.


	17. good old fashion quiet jealousy. Maybe Gawain is perceived as something he's not?

They are just sixteen when the distance forms, Galahad and Tristan had become friends early, seeming by fate to have crashed together and bonded. 

Galahad feels Tristan grow cold and distant and at first supposes it only growth into independence. It is only later he perceives that it is distance, that it is intentional

"I don't know how to coax him back," Galahad tells Gawain in confidence. "I don't know that he wants to be. 

Gawain looks over the fields where Tristan has again disappeared, then up at the hawk that circles, a black mark on blue sky.

"It may be kinder to let him go," Gawain says. "He thinks his heart is broken before he has offered it."

"His...what?"

Gawain laughs, surprised by Galahad's confusion. "He likes you."

It takes Galahad days to unfold the rest, to spool the thoughts out end to end in his mind and decide how he likes the flavor of them. When next he finds Tristan, he braves the sudden temper, the dark aura around him.

He sits next to his friend and stays quiet until Tristan is listening. 

"There is always a place for you by my side, Tristan," he says, quiet. "Not for your misery. There's no need for it."

Dark eyes lift hopeful to meet Galahad's gaze. Fate has caused another collision.


	18. the first time each looked at the other and found a desire they shouldn't have for a fellow knight

Galahad exists for the moment in a world of blood and pounding pulse, a spinning ocean of anger and danger and death. He only realizes the combat is over when no more blue painted bodies throw themselves at him with swords or knives. No more arrows fly.

It's as if he has been watching himself from above, as if time stood still while he killed men and they kept coming. Exhaustion crowds him then, dragging his sword arm down - the blade is covered in gore, so he does not sheathe it.

A motion steals into his awareness - not a threat - a wild gesture, kinetic. Tristan is still alive, too, bloody and wild and _belonging_ here, with his hair plastered back with blood and his teeth bared. That's the first time Galahad wants to kiss him.

He wants to taste what it is to be so _alive_.

-

Tristan has always been just outside the circle of light. He orbits wide around his fellows, and sometimes - in the right moments - gravity draws him in. He has never minded this, enjoying the freedom, only needing to belong when he _wants_ to.

Tonight, when he returns, Tristan reports the all-clear to Arthur. He passes the cookfire on his way back to his ten, and laughter catches his attention, a bright sound, a warm one.

He knows it, he has grown with the laughter of his brothers, but this one sound calls him the strongest. Galahad sits with his brothers, laughing, and it's the first time Tristan sees more than a boy, more than a friend, more than a brother he has grown up alongside.

Suddenly he wants to belong in that circle of light, at Galahad's side.


End file.
